The Coin - Chapter Three notes

It really is a world of difference when you have people reading and offering feedback even before a story is released to a wider audience. Considering I wrote Echoes and all of the first book of Identity without that (and most of Before and After, too), I can only imagine the possibilities had I been in this position then. What is done is done, however. At best, books two and three of Identity I'm considering posting to FFML when I get back to them. For now, I can only make The Coin the best story it can be.

I imagined the opening paragraphs as a way for Haruhi to cope with what happened--that by finding information about lightning strikes and relating it to the reader, she could better understand what she'd done. Functionally, it served to lead us in without too much of a jolt, so to speak. This is an extremely humbling experience for Haruhi, and considering how much the scene with Mori later on plays on that, I actually considered Haruhi being a bit more resistant and unsympathetic here--or at least, giving her a stronger sense of denial. Ultimately, I stuck with how this passage originally came out, with Haruhi repentant but coping and not utterly broken. Taniguchi's parents I threw in because it seemed unavoidable to meet them. Guilt is more powerful than anger. Haruhi could've proved her power to Taniguchi's mother and explained herself, but she doesn't want to be feared, and that's exactly how any reasonable person, after learning their son had been attacked by some magic-wielding girl, would react, isn't it?

After a brief stop at Haruhi's home, we get a chat between Haruhi and Mori. I admit, I deliberately pulled a fake-out here, making it sound like Asahina (big) was coming to talk to her. Make no mistake: the many faces of Mikuru Asahina will play a big part in this story, but not in this passage. Originally, I'd planned for something much quicker, shall we say---that Koizumi would go with Haruhi to show her closed space, trying to show her the consequences of her actions without revealing himself as an esper. Over time, I decided against that. We're all savvy here. We know that any sustained deception against Haruhi pulled at this stage is likely to have catastrophic consequences. Koizumi being involved in that would be exceedingly dangerous. On the other hand, the Agency isn't likely to want Haruhi to know what she is, but they definitely want to keep her under wraps and maintain the status quo. They would see this as an opportunity to lock her down for good. Hence, we have Mori, and her presence here both protects Koizumi as well as signals his lack of overt approval. Yeah, this isn't Koizumi's idea. He's already stated he'd go with the brigade over the Agency if push came to shove.

So we have Mori, and I definitely wanted Mori to come off sympathetic on one hand while still pushing Haruhi with a horrendous lie on the other. This is dramatic irony, so the audience has to do a little reading between the lines. Of course Mori isn't losing sleep over Haruhi just because she's seen her powers--the knowledge of what Haruhi can do has been beamed into her head. How can she be an actress if she's constantly having to bug out and kill a celestial? We can definitely sympathize with Mori, knowing that this is nothing she volunteered for but was chosen arbitrarily. But as I said, the Agency would see this as an opportunity to end the recent volatility, and in that, Mori is a reluctant but assured actress, playing on the sense of innate morality she knows Haruhi must have. That's what makes Mori's ploy so insidious. I hesitated for a moment to give this character the task. We know so little about her in truth, but if you're going to go for breaking Haruhi, you're going to go all the way with it. Mori does. And that's why I like this scene.

The next major scene is in the club room, which, combined with a change I made to the above, I was able to fix up from a rather confused initial draft. Originally, I had Koizumi find out what Mori had through Haruhi by himself. Then, I had Kyon get involved, punching Koizumi in the face for his seeming involvement. I think as written now the scene is much improved and more organic in the flow of events. By this point, Haruhi has sworn off her powers to protect the world from herself, but how long can that really last? How long can she be satisfied with that, knowing she's just put all her hopes for an amazing world aside?

That's what makes the baseball half of this chapter powerful. It brings all these memories back to Haruhi, forcing her to confront what she wants with what she's chosen to do. Who is this old woman? Who's the one who sent those tickets to Tsuruya's home? As Kyon says--it's someone who means to mess with Haruhi, to force the dissonance to the forefront of her mind. I did what research I could into the process of going to Koshien Stadium to see the Hanshin Tigers play. I picked the nearest home date on a weekend in mid-June from this year, which conveniently happened to be against their arch-rivals, the Yomiuri Giants from Tokyo. In the seventh inning, the fans really do blow up suggestively-shaped balloons and release them to sputter out their air. Koshien is a historic ballpark of just slightly a more modern vintage than Wrigley Field or Fenway Park. I know not everyone's a baseball fan, so I tried to focus on Haruhi's nostalgia rather than the strict experience of the game (which, admittedly, was a pretty boring game past its halfway point).

Then we get Asakura, and I admit, I hesitated to include her in this after using her as a tool from Mori's conversation, but Asakura is the natural, most sinister choice. You've got to love the way she goes about things. Threaten fifty thousand people? Sure, why not, it'll be fun right? Eheh. I struggled a bit to figure out how to end this chapter--just with Asakura revealing herself? No, we want to connect this to Nagato, too. Let's leave Haruhi with as many questions as we can, after all. Asakura's role in this story isn't finished, of course. There's much for Haruhi to learn about herself and her powers. Her world view is really going to get upended.

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The Coin - Chapter Two notes

Chapter Two on FFN

Ever since I changed the way I outline and stopped writing dialogue in advance, I've taken a hard look at the outlines, trying to ensure that they have sufficient material to give pacing and time. What I understand now, having written this chapter, is that often times it's not about what you had planned but what you didn't plan, what comes to you as you're writing. I think that's a big reason why this is a 12000-word chapter and not 6- or 8- instead.

With the initial outline, I didn't plan that Haruhi would call up Kyon. Rather, she'd just shut herself into her room and work on her powers all night. In this respect, I think expansion was necessary. There has to be a progression of thought process, and this way, we got to see a little bit of Kyon's reactions. What's Kyon trying to do here? Haruhi's exactly right: he encouraged her, and now he's backing off. I personally think Kyon is of two mind on this--that he's weary of the masquerade and doesn't mind if Haruhi realizes her powers, but on the other hand, while he likes the excitement around her, I think Kyon's pretty attached to the times in which he has a normal life.

Of course, this is the beginning of delving a little bit into Kyon and Haruhi's relationship dynamics. Haruhi's signals are pretty clear while Kyon is more evasive. Kyon's selective obliviousness powers are legendary, after all, and to really understand where he's coming from, one has to answer the age-old question: just why would he avoid a relationship with her? It's possible he's not attracted to her, of course, but there's also the unequal pairing dynamic that has to be considered. Someone who can will him to her bedroom just by thinking about it should frankly give him pause.

But let me not jump too far ahead. This scene with Kyon and Haruhi I changed a bit on Brian Randall's advice. There was an element of hostility that I'd thought was natural just from Haruhi's personality, but it didn't serve any real purpose, and it served to paint Haruhi as having "regressed" toward her antagonistic, book one personality. That's really not what I'm trying to do, though I think her frustration at finding people unwilling to embrace the unknown is absolutely essential.

The scene with Haruhi's father was something I inserted, adding upon the outline. When I visualize him, I see a guy in a green vest with black-rimmed glasses. None of that matters, of course. It's his advice to Haruhi that's meant to be pertinent: to make bonds with people, specifically with one person, but the general sentiment is the same. Here we start a veritable hurricane of references, which I don't generally get to do. Negima and Star Wars are just for starters. Originally, Haruhi was going to get control of her power in her bedroom, but the dishes scene was a good way to implement how I'd like her powers to be portrayed--with things just spontaneously changing off-screen. On a practical level, that probably won't stick (everything else in this chapter is very visual and in real time), but I thought it was a powerful way to do the initial realization. And then we have Nagato watching her again. The Entity is definitely looking on.

As with the Haruhi's father scene, the short snippet with Haruhi starting a stalled car I added to give a little pacing. We quickly get to the gravity scene in the classroom, and this one I thought about for a good while to make sure it'd work. The bulk of that calculation is detailed in the chapter notes on FFN. It's actually a good, basic problem in Newtonian mechanics, just to get a ballpark figure.

To give Haruhi some time to cool off a bit, I added this scene with Haruhi at the convenience store, since she'd need to go there anyway to set up the next scene. As I said, the Entity is watching, and it should come as no surprise who the mysterious, always-smiling girl might be. Haruhi realizing her powers is something the Entity must necessarily take a keen interest in, even if it means no longer simply observing.

Though it may not seem it, I think the scene in the club room is the centerpiece of this chapter because it really underscores the magnitude of what's changed. Dare I say no one was really prepared for it? Well, that'll change, as Koizumi, Asahina, and Nagato consider the best thing to do for achieving their ends: preserving the stability of this world, the integrity of the future, or learning the secrets to auto-evolution, whatever the case may be. Those are the goals of their masters, I should say. What these three exceptional people want for themselves may well be a different story. As for Kyon...well, we'll get to that in a few moments.

Like I said, I think it important that Haruhi have strong reactions to things, especially when they don't go her way, but to highlight her growth, I do feel like those reactions must subside quickly. So Haruhi has to, er, find a way to relieve her frustrations. I admit, this was a scene I hesitated to write at first, knowing the territory it would take the story if I followed through. Nevertheless, I felt like I thought things through, and this scene sets up the following as it should. I made a conscious choice not to be pornographic in detail here. Truthfully, such details don't appeal to me, and I didn't think they befit the scene, either. With Asahina, Haruhi's feelings may have a distinct physical component. With Kyon, I think the attraction is on a more intellectual level. There's an element of wanting to convert him to her mindset and feeling like there's a challenge in doing so. There's an element of appreciating that he sticks around, that he reminds her of John Smith (but that she uses that as an excuse, not really admitting to herself how she feels). There's an obvious duality being invoked here with the metaphor of the electron and the positron, reinforcing that, while Kyon and Haruhi act like opposites in a lot of ways, they're still very similar and very, very linked.

When I wrote the scenes that follow this point, Haruhi didn't realize she'd teleported Kyon to her room at all. Even here, she doesn't until the very end, mostly because I felt her realizing it and understanding the consequences was a more neutral sort of revelation than the one I originally ended with: Kyon rejecting her, albeit obliquely, and Haruhi storming off in a rage. Again, that's part of Brian Randall's influence, and I think it makes sense. It risks oversaturating people on Haruhi's anger if she were to do it repeatedly from this early in the work. The revised version here makes her more vulnerable and her reactions less disproportionate.

Something that bugged Brian was that Kyon wouldn't outright call her out on this or, more broadly, that he wouldn't just tell her the truth of things right now. For my part...that would cut through a lot of the story. Heh. But beyond that, I really feel like Kyon's trying to prepare Haruhi here, trying to get her to think bigger about consequences before he really lets the cat out of the bag and, in doing so, tells her she has power of that magnitude. It's a tricky balance, and as we see, it may be somewhat misguided, but in telling her he wants to be there (through the oblique retelling of Disappearance) and that he has faith in her, he's definitely trying to give her support and invoke a bond of trust. I think back to "Remote Island Syndrome" and how Kyon never seriously thought Haruhi could be responsible for a murder. It's ironic that she hits upon that line here, but I think Kyon's trust at that moment still stands. As much as Haruhi is wont to do whatever she wants, Kyon still believes her to be a fundamentally good person. Maybe this is something Koizumi encouraged him to do, and instead Kyon decided to go about it in his own way. Regardless, it almost works. Almost.

So we conclude with Haruhi looking for wonder in others and not finding it, and this time, Taniguchi's harsh words wound her because she's afraid he's right. Taniguchi's anger over this bag is, of course, set up in a passing comment right after Haruhi ends her gravity spell.

To come in chapter three, the lid comes off, and we'll see Haruhi humbled by what she's done. Not everyone watching her will be happy with that.

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Haruhi novels 9-11 omnibus in LaTeX

The Dissociation & The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, omnibus edition in LaTeX

I've been working on this for a little while now, slowly tearing apart the PDFs and EPUBs put together by ultimatemegax and other translators. I thought this would be a fun way to put these three books, which comprise an arc in an of themselves, together and to learn a little more about LaTeX. Let me say, the ins and outs of character encoding are "fun" in the not-so-fun sort of way. Even so, after saving images by hand out of the PDFs and messing with changing smart quotes to LaTeX style, I have a finished product. It's not perfect, I'm sure. There are probably lots of things I've missed, particularly with peculiarly-formatted text. That said, it's workable and I can always put in a revision.

The contents of the main file are below. The full text is put into various subdocuments.

\documentclass[ebook, 10pt, openany]{memoir}
\usepackage{fourier}
\usepackage[pdfpagelayout=TwoColumnRight]{hyperref}
\usepackage[calcwidth,nobottomtitles*]{titlesec}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{CJK}
\usepackage{latexsym}

\newcommand{\pbreak}{\pfbreak}
\renewcommand{\chaptermark}[1]{\markboth{\textsc{The Dissociation} \& \textsc{The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya}}{\textsc{#1}}} %customizes headers
\renewcommand{\sectionmark}[1]{} %prevents sections (alpha-# and beta-#) from changing headers
\newcommand{\qs}{~}

\renewcommand{\verbatimbreakchar}{} %used for yuki.n> terminal sequences, allows verbatims to wrap with no indicator

\begin{document}
\frontmatter

\title{The Dissociation \\ \& \\ The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya}
\author{By Nagaru Tanigawa \\ with Illustrations by Noizi It\=o}
\date{May 25, 2011}
\maketitle{}
\wrappingon{} %verbatim wrapping
\newpage{}
\setcounter{tocdepth}{0} %toc reads unnumbered; better than using chapter* and manually adding toc entries
\tableofcontents{}
\newpage{}
\sloppy{}
\include{ds-translators}

\include{ds-notes}

\mainmatter{}

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-2} %nothing numbered

\newpage{}
\include{ds-dis} %contains the full-color images before the main text, etc.
\include{ds00}
\include{ds01}
\include{ds02}
\include{ds03}

\include{ds-sur1}
\include{ds04}
\include{ds05}
\begin{CJK*}[dnp]{EUC-JP}{min} %chapter 6 has japanese characters, requires CJK package and proper encoding of the .tex file (in this case, euc-jp)
\include{ds06}

\include{ds-sur2}
\include{ds-07-12}
\end{CJK*}
\end{document}

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The Coin - Chapter One

Chapter One on FFN

With a first chapter of a story, which I haven't had the privilege of writing since April of last year, it's all about setting the stage. In a lot of ways, I'm aware of how this story isn't like "Before and After," as while Rei was influenced and affected by others, Haruhi is much more overt in her feelings and opinions of people. Where Rei would learn from others, Haruhi's interactions with people have a distinct character. She finds what she likes and dislikes in them, and that's what lies at the core of her narration in this story.

Each scene is part of a progression in Haruhi's thought process. The first, in which she decides that this coin business is worth pursuing, is also a chance for Haruhi to be a bit of a showoff and interact obliquely with Kyon. Being a physicist, I enjoy the tidbits of science and mathematics that are sprinkled in the original books, and this was my attempt to work some of that in here. As I say in the note at the end of the chapter, this is a mathematically-valid limit and historically, it plays a part in the recognition of e as a special number. For my part, I think it's much better to look at the derivative properties of exponentials, but it's all about the same, at any rate. Haruhi, remember, is exceedingly gifted athletically and academically. Why is this? I could say it comes from a general thirst for understanding, for trying to find something amazing in the world, but I can't say for sure.

Something I knew I wanted to setup here was Nagato being outside their classroom. In a typical Haruhi novel, Kyon has to adapt to the developing situation, gathering advice from Nagato, Koizumi, or Asahina as it's available or necessary. Haruhi is never privy to this conversations, so this is the beginning of something going on behind her back. Nagato's exceedingly capable and powerful. She already knows what Haruhi's beginning to exert conscious control. While Haruhi leaves, Nagato is telling Kyon and he's thinking about what he's going to do. Kyon, at least initially, won't want the world to be upended, but it's also something he's going to consider greatly. What can he do? Dissuade her? Convince her it's all nothing? Nagato, for her part, is there to observe. While she and Kyon aren't in direct danger, she won't interfere, even if she wants to, for there's a great deal of scrutiny upon her from the Entity.

But Haruhi's not concerned with all of that just yet, even if she does notice it. She recalls here what Kyon told her in "Snowy Mountain Syndrome" and that Nagato fell ill in one of the divergent plots of Dissociation and Surprise. These are all things that Haruhi's knowledge of is incomplete, but what I hoped to get across is that the brigade and its members are intensely important to her. In Haruhi's mind, they've stuck together because they're kindred spirits. It's not just an inaccurate description of reality; it's just not true. While Koizumi in particular and the girls too may be loyal to her, they all have other motives. As I've said, they're not seeking the extraordinary; they already know it exists and are trying to understand it (Nagato) or contain it (Asahina and Koizumi).

Part of my effort to soften Haruhi a bit involved extending the club room scene here. As Haruhi prepares to dress Asahina, she asks the latter how she feels about that. Does Asahina actually enjoy it on some level? I think so. Does she also feel compelled to say yes regardless, in order to keep Haruhi appeased? I think so too. Perversely, it's an equal relationship of sorts. Their inequities are just so piled on top of each other that they cancel out. It's equally...not so good.

Of course, you can't soften Haruhi so much that her wackiness doesn't come out. It's utterly shameless for her to set up this scheme, and yet it's effective. Originally, Asahina would be approached by these two boys and Haruhi would actually kick one of them in the shins, sending him flying a few feet. Again, I toned this down, and her defiance manifests as a "natural" sinkhole. In keeping with "Remote Island Syndrome," where Kyon submits that Haruhi would never see someone killed, it would've been over the top, in my mind, to have her harm this brat with her power. She's not nearly angry enough to do anything of the sort. Yet.

This is also where Kyon returns, of course, and while he enjoys Asahina in her Santa suit, he's also trying to subtly trying to dissuade Haruhi, a symptom of his confused thoughts on the matter. At this point, Kyon's probably trying to see if anything really comes of this investigation. Maybe he doesn't need to dissuade her; maybe he's asked Nagato to make sure nothing really happens. I don't know if I ascribe to this theory, but I think it's fair for Kyon to be more passive and observant rather than forwardly engaging of Haruhi.

Haruhi's plan for analyzing these coins is, in my mind, quite logical. Asahina is going to be the slowest link in any assembly line. Better to have everyone else waiting than to have a load of work pile up on her at the end of the chain. Haruhi's "oversight" is a way for me to hedge this sympathetic portrayal just a little bit.

But in the end, nothing is found, and Haruhi returns to a state of melancholy. This, to me, is the pivotal Kyon moment. Screw logic. Screw what the others need him for. As much as Kyon snarks Haruhi--he's done it more than once this chapter--he's at least considerate of her feelings. He backs off. He tempers his earlier criticism and encourages Haruhi to pursue the matter if she feels she should. Perhaps Kyon is weary of the masquerade. Maybe he justifies this to himself. He might think it unlikely that Haruhi actually will, but some good credit from her will make his life easier later. Or maybe his thoughts are more aggressive than that--Haruhi's had the powers of a god for so long now, the people around her should accept that she has them. There are several explanations here. Part of the freedom of writing from this perspective is that we don't really know what Kyon's thinking here, and neither does Haruhi. While she appreciates him as much as she's willing to admit, the idea that their outlooks on life are fundamentally at odds is ingrained in her. To me, part of the challenge Haruhi puts to herself is convincing people like Kyon to look for the unusual. She just doesn't know that Kyon's already made that choice in Disappearance.

So we get home, and Haruhi's mother is a bit of a lethal chef, so all she does is prepare ingredients and let her daughter do the rest. Based on the current plan for chapter two, we'll meet Haruhi's father as well. But this is where a seemingly meaningless scene comes back from Chekhov's Armory to hit the point home. Originally, Haruhi was going to have thought Kan was interested in little girls and cemented that in reality by having some questionable photos come out, but I thought this would be a little better. There's nothing like the image of a politician freaking out in front of kids and shattering a wooden table for a few laughs. And while originally, I also had Haruhi realize what that meant explicitly before the chapter was over, her mother's line here seemed like an excellent hook for chapter two.

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The Coin - Prologue

The prologue on FFN

So a week ago I posed the prologue to FFN and to the Fanfiction Mailing List. It was to a good deal of necessary feedback that I retracted the FFN version and decided to rewrite the prologue anew. In my hate, I'd hoped to capture Haruhi's manic, eccentric nature. Instead, I rehashed old jokes and schemes, and I ignored the growth of this character from her initial sociopathy in Melancholy to the character we know at the end of Dissociation and in the as-yet-unfinished translation of Surprise. And while it wasn't my intention to paint Haruhi in such a negative light, I realized that if I couldn't get across her bizarre mindset, I'd have to find some other take on her instead.

What I eventually settled on was, instead of playing up her oddities in interactions, the strangeness of her thought process was just as well. More than that, I found an angle more appropriate for the direction of the story as a whole.

The basics of this prologue are the same as the first one, the ultimate point being that Haruhi has finally noticed the effects of her powers in a way that she can suspect, that she'll think about rather than dismiss. It's a small thing, but it'll take her far. The rest of the prologue as it stands is getting her to that point, showing her attitude toward the unusual and the extraordinary and how she sees herself as being different from others. It's entirely intentional that Kyon's name is not said, of course---I wanted there to be at least some doubt about who the narrator was until it became clear at the end. Naturally, most people are probably able to pick up on it, but there's value in not stating something outright until you want to. No matter how sure people are in their interpretations, confirmation needs to obey the proper timing.

Overall, I'm much happier with this prologue. It really does come down to likeability. If Haruhi is entirely unsympathetic, no one will care about the journey she's about to embark on.

Aside from characterization issues, it actually takes quite a bit of research to make sure you get details right with this series. By nature, those details will be spread out, and it took, in my view, some hunting around. In this respect, the anime is somewhat more useful, I think, than the novels. It's a lot easier to get a visual on things, to capture a lot of information in a short time.

As I said in the chapter body itself, this is my examination of who Haruhi is and what she really wants. All this time, the three factions around her have had their own goals, but most importantly, they want their own survival or the survival of the various worlds they live in. But this story hopes to probe at a more fundamental question: what kind of person goes looking for aliens, time-travelers, and espers like Haruhi does? Is the search for those fantastic creatures the goal? What does one hope to discover along the way, while one makes the journey? In a sense, it's about faith. Haruhi's conscious belief in the fantastic has never wavered, even if her drive and enthusiasm for the quest has been tempered by experience and time. Look at the people around her: they believe in those fantastic things because they themselves are fantastic, but to them, it's merely reality. It may be a thing of curiosity, but it's still something they accept not out of faith but knowledge. It brings into question, among other issues, whether one can ever find something truly fantastic. Once that thing is found, doesn't it become part of the greater world? Doesn't it become as accepted and ordinary as everything else?

That may be too much a question of psychology, but I think it relevant.

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"Before and After" Conclusion - Chs. 9 & 10

The final chapters on FFN

So this is it. A story ends. Endings are always something difficult for me, this one a little less so because the feeling I meant to end with has been so clear.

That's not to say these last two chapters haven't been difficult. In part, it's my disquiet with their writing process that I present both of them together, if only to give myself the feeling that I'm ending with something I'm comfortable with, instead of the chapter nine that we have, of which so much comes directly from the source material. To a great extent, I could come up with nothing better to do for these parts. The events that transpire here I've interpreted as having a direct impact on Rei's thought processes and mindset. I couldn't simply gloss over them. Conversely, there's a lot of mental contemplation that happens in both the last two episodes of the series and End of Evangelion. A lot of this I chose not to rehash, simply because I thought doing it from scratch when necessary would be more powerful. In addition, such scenes I felt were difficult to integrate into a "real-time" sort of story the way "Before and After" generally is.

Overall, I felt the thought process for Rei had to be this: when she's reborn, she wants to die, but Misato implores her to reconsider. When she meets Kaworu, she realizes death won't be enough, as something else that's not her will still remain--that is, Lilith. As the events of chapter nine, the beginning of EoE, play out, she becomes convinced of her own and humanity's suffering, and in a moment of compassion with Shinji and spite for Gendo, she's willing to merge with Lilith and risk losing everything of herself, but instead, she finds herself the dominant one. She explores Shinji's mindset and, when he rejects Instrumentality, she makes the decision to die and let them all be freed. In a lot of ways, that's these two chapters in a nutshell. It's the journey to get to these places that I find interesting.

Most of chapter nine is told from Rei's perspective as an observer. It should be understood that she relates these events from having "peered" into people's hearts as well as going back in time to witness them as a specter, the same specters that reap people's souls and convert them to LCL in EoE. Thus, chronologically speaking, while these events actually happen in this chapter, when Rei would glimpse and experience them is actually during her time after merging with Lilith.

A lot of this chapter is built on the theory from EvaGeeks wiki on the phantom appearances of Rei--the idea that Rei, as Lilith, has transcended time and can be in multiple places and times at once. From this, I hoped to take things a step further: such a being would be effectively immortal, despite "dying" as we see her do in the final scenes of Eoe. For all intents and purposes, the "time" she has to go backward and forward and be everywhere is infinite. She can "exist" after her body has died and before she merged with Lilith at all.

As I said, chapter nine is largely taken straight from EoE, and the skeleton of chapter ten is largely the same, but here, since so much more emphasis is placed on the evolution of the mind, I thought it best to put as much new material here as I could. It's my opinion that episodes 25 and 26 take place alongside or concurrently with the film, and for a while, I'd thought I'd try to reconcile the two and depict them as such, but this I found to be an unsatisfying idea, and I decided to go with what I have here: namely, a glimpse of what Rei would see, which by no means do I intend to be complete. I'd originally thought to depict several scenes with the technicians--Hyuga, Ibuki, and Aoba--but I trimmed it down to one because I thought it'd be too long a jaunt away from the center of the piece: Rei and Shinji. I did hope that passage, with Hyuga's hopes going unrealized, gave substance to Rei's feeling that humanity was full of unfulfilled desires. It's not enough, at that point, to leave that as a blanket statement without backing.

I quickly latched onto the idea of Shinji being shown a dream world of sorts, keeping in mind that a dreaming alone would be a "substitute for reality" and shouldn't be done. Thus, he hears a little bit of what other people think of him. I pondered how to go about this. Instrumentality is depicted in many different ways. Sometimes, Shinji seems apart and himself. Other time, he's flooded with what Misato, Rei, and Asuka think of him. I felt I had the freedom to pursue this passage, then. I tried to keep it brief, as I felt the goal of the ending coming quickly. My reasoning here was that Rei would show Shinji a world that was the pinnacle of his desires--close to what he knows but better in several ways. In this, she tests Shinji, and he realizes that he does want the affections of other people, but not so easily that they become meaningless and fake. This, in my view, is consistent with his final decision in EoE, and I felt it was a logical way to extend his thinking: maybe it's not the only time Shinji made that decision. Maybe he was tested several times.

So we get to the end, and Shinji's alone. Rei wants to fix that, so she goes to Asuka. I considered going into more detail at this point, but that would've felt very off to me. Rei doesn't have that emotional connection to her--some sympathy yes, but not a lot of connection. It would've slowed everything way down here, so I hoped to avoid it. We already know it's going to happen, and there wasn't a lot of value, in my mind, in seeing Asuka's journey toward it.

And that leads us to the end. Asuka and Shinji have survived, and Rei will be the eternal observer, helping the souls of humanity return from the LCL sea. At last, her fate is one she chooses, and over Shinji, she'll always be watching. Here is the culmination of the extended use of A Tale of Two Cities, with Rei mirroring Sydney Carton. But Rei is still alive, even if she's chosen the time and place of her death, and this will not be the last we see of her, nor the last I write of her. As I said, I have plans for a companion story--a sequel in one sense--called The Coming of the First Ones. As Asuka and Shinji try to rebuild humanity's future, one of the other Seeds of Life, the sinister Eisheth, sets its gaze on mankind, and once again, it will be up to the older and wiser children to protect themselves and the Earth itself. Rei will play her part, and it's a story I look forward to writing, at some point in the future.

I guess that's why this doesn't really feel like the end to me. I know there's more story to be told, even if it's part of a different tale. To that end, this is not "goodbye," but rather, "see you soon."

To my readers, thank you.

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Before and After 08 - "Before Tabris"

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Commentary below will no longer be hidden by default. Be warned for spoilers here.

I'd thought before writing chapter seven that these two chapters could go together and make something of similar length to chapter six. It seems I was right on that, but the story is much, much better served by having them separate, for they accomplish different purposes. "After Armisael" was all about the futility of living. Here, this is Rei denying what she is over and over until she's forced to accept it.

A bit part of what distances Shinji from Rei is how he says he's afraid of her, that he doesn't want to see her or Misato. What does Shinji do? Run away from painful things. The Rei we have now is colder, and she isn't like the friend he knows. I hoped to take that to the logical extent, and while Shinji would try to run away as much as possible, it stood to reason (at least to me) that at some point he might get cornered, and in doing so, Rei would learn just what it is that makes him avoid her.

Make no mistake: Rei's trying to understand what she is here, why she sees and feels things that shouldn't be. She latches on to the idea of being Yui because that's digestible, palatable compared to the alternative--that she's something much more bizarre and Lovecraftian in origin. What's more frightening--a creature of unthinkable thought and motive with grotesque and disgusting bodily features, or a girl like Rei who is that creature bottled into a human-looking form? For Rei, the fear is that that thing will come out, and she will no longer be herself. I tried to draw as much as I could on "The Case of Ayanami Rei" scene in episode 25, where the image of Rei I taunts the others, saying that they're afraid because of the thing that might not have human form (cue inkblot images). What Rei wants in dying is to no longer be, not to wake up and be something else again, something stripped of what she used to be--or worse, something completely inhuman.

I originally wrote the escalator scene first. The result was a chapter that jumped around a little chronologically. It felt like something more likely to be actually written by a person, but it also seemed rather ineffective at showing, at least to me. I made things more chronological by going to the lockers first (do they even have lockers? the best I've seen are a couple scenes from Rebuild where Misato slaps Shinji in what looks like a bathroom or a set of showers versus Shinji and Rei donning their plug suits in some sort of cargo container).

I spent comparatively more time on Rei's confrontation with Kaworu. I inserted the paragraphs where Rei imagines what Kaworu's saying with more details than he says. This, along with the couple scenes where Rei looks into the mirror and sees something wrong with herself, I felt was necessary. Otherwise, Rei's fear of being something else isn't really catalyzed, and it gives credence to Kaworu's hint that Rei's memories aren't gone, merely suppressed or taken from her, yet something is able to creep back in.

How Kaworu describes the First Ancestral Race is deliberately a bit vague. I didn't want to depict them directly--I vastly preferred to keep their appearance mysterious and secret. Describing their architecture seemed fair, however, and I realized that there had to be some explanation for why they wouldn't have spread to the stars, being as powerful as they were. The calamity that befalls them is no ordinary supernova, but rather a gamma-ray burst, something thought to be an extremely deadly event if one were to hit Earth. I drew heavily from the EvaGeeks wiki to get this background right, but it's very tangled and complex. For instance, a lot of fanwanking has been done just to figure out the possible plot hole in this episode, between Kaworu realizing it's Lilith, not Adam, on the cross and Seele telling him that Gendo has Adam's body already. I put forth my own theory here: that Kaworu, like the other Angels, senses what's in Terminal Dogma and knows it's far stronger than whatever Gendo has. He believes it's Adam because that's what he's been told, and he accepts that that would cause calamity, the Third Impact, because that's also what he's been told, but when he realizes it's Lilith, he understands: there's no extra mechanism here. The only Third Impact there can be is when the Fruits of Life and Knowledge merge, when something of Adam and Lilith come together. They're the same thing, and at last, he understands what Seele's trying to do.

I also consider it likely that what Kaworu says about the hybrid being, of what would happen if he and Lilith were to merge, as being somewhat untrue. I'd think the First Ancestral Race would fear that being's power (as we will see later) as much as they fear it being too prideful to be wise.

I deliberately kept from depicting Kaworu's realization in full until the end of the chapter, to punctuate the use of that name. Giving a name to something you already know of is a powerful thing, so when Shinji looks at her and wonders what she is, she knows the answer, as much as she may try to deny it.

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